What's Twitter, Anyway? Don't Ask Russell Simmons

Twitter might be, as Nate Westheimer writes, a billion dollar business (because they can become a P2P payment system, he says) , but that doesn't mean that most people know what it is.

For the Naked Media show, we took our mic and camera out to a park in financial district today, and of about a dozen people we asked -- including Russell Simmons, who happened to be sitting with a woman in the park -- only one (not Simmons) had even the vaguest idea of what Twitter is. The one who knew said she doesn't use it, doesn't blog either. "I read, not write" -- important for us all to remember, sometimes, that not everyone is a content creator.

Twitter might become as ubiquitous as eBay or Google or Yahoo. It ain't there, yet. And another way it could be a billion dollar biz (he says, hyphothesizingly) would be if it became part of something else, so people would be using Twitter technology without knowing it. In the same way that RSS is used in myriad applications, such as NetVibes or MyYahoo, with only a small fraction of the millions using them knowing what RSS is.

You'll be able to watch the episode, which was webcast live at noon ET, on demand soon, at ScribeMedia.org, or through TeemingMedia.com.